Endpapers, p.35
Endpapers, page 35
They occurred when As a result of her own Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, a German cousin has come to regard the compromises of Dr. Albrecht, the supervisor of that Munich lazaretto, by the light of the Hippocratic Oath: “He was sworn to protect those in a vulnerable position. The least he could do was make sure he wouldn’t be in a vulnerable position himself.”
During the Enlightenment Burhop et al., Merck 1668–2018, 60–69.
Thus, when Emanuel Merck Ibid., 101–8.
“Always Curious” Merkel is a world-class chider. During a 2018 visit to the White House, she gave President Donald Trump a 1705 map of Germany’s Rhineland-Palatinate, the region that includes Kallstadt, from which Trump’s ancestors emigrated to the United States. The message in her gift could not have been clearer: don’t forget that you are a descendant of immigrants.
Appraising the city Cited in Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, 23.
Three months later The RAF’s September 11 attack on Darmstadt was an “area raid,” according to a report by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey: “The city of Darmstadt was levelled in fifty-one minutes by 234 Lancasters and Halifaxes which dropped approximately 979 tons of HEs [high explosives] and IBs [incendiary bombs] on the center of the town. This was an area raid of the classic saturation type, which had so effectively razed Cologne and Hamburg. The target had been well-lighted by star flares released by low-flying Mosquitos, and the fleet of four-engined bombers, flying at high altitude, met no opposition from either anti-aircraft or enemy fighters. The mechanics of the raid, between the ‘target sighted’ and the ‘bombs away,’ were almost perfunctory, and as a consequence Darmstadt was virtually destroyed.” By contrast, the bombing by the US Eighth Air Force on December 12, 1944, which targeted the Merck factory and cut off Hitler’s supply of Eukodal, was a “precision raid,” in which “446 B-17s, almost twice as many planes as the RAF had used in its September area attack, dropped 1,011 tons of GPs (general purpose bombs) and 310 tons of IBs on the city’s chief industrial area, northwest of the center of the town. E. Merck was the chief target. . . . Sixty employees were killed. . . . Not only did the plant incur RM 40,000,000 [roughly $16 million] of material damage but it lost about 98 percent of its production for two months.” The report also states that the city was of little strategic importance to the Third Reich, even as information would emerge after World War II that Merck was more involved in the Nazi war effort than previously believed. U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Area Studies Division, A Detailed Study of the Effects of Area Bombing on Darmstadt, Washington, DC, 1945, 1–29, in Merck-Archiv, F15-7.
“When I think of Germany” W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Vintage Books, 2002), 181.
German TV documentary Caterina Woj and Andrea Röpke, “Das braune Netzwerk: Wer steuert die Wütburger?” Die Story, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, January 11, 2017.
The family, Merck Cem Tevetoglu, Matin Nawabi, and Tobi Moka, “Merck in der Zwickmühle,” Soziales Darmstadt, March 2017.
For three years Friedrich Wilhelm Euler joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and soon took a post with the interior ministry, for which he performed eugenic surveys and compiled data used in drafting the Nuremberg Laws. As recently as 1975, Euler—also known as Wilfried, a portmanteau of his given names—was still editing the family journal, the Merck’sche Familien-Zeitschrift. Alan E. Steinweis, Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 107; and Burhop et al., Merck 1668–2018, 22–23.
During tricentennial festivities Burhop et al., Merck 1668–2018, 26.
It joined Erinnerung “Merck KGaA Plans Nazi-Era Forced Labour Compensation,” ICIS.com, December 8, 1999. Merck identified 257 forced laborers, mostly young women from Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, who had been assigned to its Darmstadt plant during the war. The company’s offer amounted to a little more than $5,000 per person, with surviving family ineligible to collect if the exploited worker had died.
The current director Birte Förster, “Seitenweise Aufschlussreiches,” Hoch: Die Zeitung der Technischen Universität Darmstadt, December 2015. To open a window on nearly a century of German social and political events covered in Mathilde Merck’s diaries, Professor Förster’s students sorted entries by topic and logged keywords. They divvied up themes among themselves—Tante Tilla’s marriage, her travels, her daughter’s adolescence, as well as her Nazi views—and tweeted out their findings.
And so, at a table Several months after my visit to the Merck-Archiv, Munich’s Verlag C. H. Beck published Merck 1668–2018: From a Pharmacy to a Global Corporation, a study by four independent historians: Carsten Burhop, Michael Kißener, Hermann Schäfer, and Joachim Scholtyseck. Where archival holdings track what is contained in its pages, I cite the English-language edition of that volume. I cite Merck-Archiv file numbers for material with no corresponding mention in the 350th anniversary history.
Walter Brügmann Burhop et al., Merck 1668–2018, 308.
Yet I still learn Ibid., 312.
With the war Ibid., 324–32.
“If, after 1945” Ibid., 495.
On May 1, 1933 Ibid., 270.
Returning to Darmstadt Ibid., 273.
In 1939 Ibid., 304–5.
With the armistice Ibid., 227.
Under the Treaty Ibid., 247.
During the Ruhr crisis Ibid., 229.
To meet these challenges Ibid., 228.
As this newcomer Ibid., 253.
“I am really overjoyed” Ibid., 254.
Studying and then emulating Ibid., 313–23.
As one observer Ibid., 256–57.
leaving Wilhelm and Louis Ibid., 313–23. In a June 1, 1942, file memo, Pfotenhauer himself documented what the Nazi Party was prepared to do if Wilhelm and Louis refused to relent: “A commissioner [to take over the company] will be appointed without delay by the Reich Ministry of Economics at the suggestion of the Gauleiter.”
Pfotenhauer also curtailed Ibid., 322. A contemporaneous newspaper account of the verdict in Karl Merck’s de-Nazification hearing suggests that, without the ongoing presence of Karl and Fritz in the company’s directorate, “Pfotenhauer would have merged the factory with the IG [Farben] concern, and it would likewise be on the decommissioning list today.” After the war the Allies broke up IG Farben, the most notorious industrial conglomerate in the Third Reich. The firm used slave labor at its Auschwitz plant and manufactured the gas used in the death camps. “Vor der Spruchkammer/Dr. Karl Merck in Gruppe IV,” Darmstädter Echo, June 1, 1948.
Pfotenhauer’s daughter Ursula Ibid., 337.
He was unwilling Ibid. One of Pfotenhauer’s daughters, Margot, survived her poisoning. Ursula was not in Darmstadt at the time.
Two days later Ibid.
You know that Draft of Kurt Wolff letter to George W. Merck, August 4, 1947, Merck-Archiv, A-148. The company history Merck 1668–2018 sources this letter not to Kurt but to Rudolf Gruber, vice president of US-based Merck & Co. But the draft in the Merck-Archiv is on Pantheon Books letterhead and includes those telltale references to Kurt’s visit with my father and grandmother in Munich.
responsible American CEO “We try never to forget that medicine is for the people,” George W. Merck would say in a 1950 speech at the Medical College of Virginia. “It is not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear. The better we have remembered it, the larger they have been.” For the most part, that spirit persisted at the American Merck & Co. through the rest of the century. In his 2020 book Pharma, which is broadly critical of the US drug industry, Merck included, Gerald Posner nonetheless highlights the firm’s decision to supply Mectizan, an antidote to parasitic diseases in the developing world, free of charge. “It marked the only instance in modern pharma history in which a leading firm gave away a drug they discovered and patented in order to eradicate a disease,” he writes. “By the time the scientists who discovered Mectizan won the Nobel in Medicine in 2015, Merck had distributed over a billion doses in thirty-three countries.” Gerald Posner, Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020), 388.
“[The political left is] trying” Draft of Kurt Wolff letter to George W. Merck, August 4, 1947, Merck-Archiv, A-148.
“Mr. John pointed out” Ibid.
The Allies’ victory Burhop et al., Merck 1668–2018, 348–49 and 357.
First of all Merck-Archiv, A-1052.
With the 1937 merger The Nazis established the Deutscher Luftsportverband (DLV), or German Air Sports Association, and the Nationalsozialistisches Fliegerkorps (NSFK), or National Socialist Flyers’ Corps, as forerunners of the Luftwaffe to train military pilots.
in a 1939 speech Burhop, et al., Merck 1668–2018, 278.
Invoking testimony submitted Ibid., 268.
Two Stolpersteine The two men Wilhelm mentions were parties to what were thought in some instances to be “privileged” mixed marriages—apparently like that of Wilhelm Hausenstein and his wife, Margot, for at least part of the Nazi era. Nazi Kreisleiter Schilling nonetheless ordered that Engelmann, an engineer at Merck for eighteen years, be arrested in 1943, despite the Nazis’ considering his wife to be “Aryan.” He was sent first to a labor camp in 1944 and then to Theresienstadt a year later, before being murdered. A Stolperstein at Rhönring 14 in Darmstadt marks his life and death. Henkel, a non-Jew, was fired in October 1941 on Schilling’s orders. The company paid him a pension, but his Jewish wife, Emmy, was deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in 1943. A Stolperstein at Jahnstrasse 116 bears witness. Burhop, et al., Merck 1668–2018, 305. An inventory of Stolpersteine within the city of Darmstadt can be found at dfg-vk-darmstadt.de.
Another, a Herr Weigand “Spruchkammer Darmstadt-Stadt, Begründung in Sachen Merck, Wilhelm,” June 30, 1948, Merck-Archiv, A-1052.
He was soon reinstated Burhop, et al., Merck 1668–2018, 349.
Chapter Eighteen: The End, Come by Itself
But he had no use With the establishment of the Third Reich, a preexisting movement within German Protestantism forged ahead with its vision of a “German church” that embraced Nazi attitudes toward nationalism, “racial” differences, and Jews. In response, dissidents like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller devoted themselves to a “Confessing church” that kept God and Scripture separate from any earthly political leader or movement. Meanwhile many Catholic figures accommodated themselves to the regime, even as the Nazis outlawed the Catholic Centre Party. After Hitler struck a deal with the Vatican in 1933, Joseph Roth alluded to “a time when His Holiness, the infallible Pope of Christendom, is concluding a peace agreement, a Concordat, with the enemies of Christ, when the Protestants are establishing a ‘German church’ and censoring the Bible.” Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920–1933, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 209.
“Rage is something” Franz Kafka postcard to Max Brod, September 6, 1923, in Kafka, Letters to Friends, 379.
But I was reluctant In his memoir, Günter Grass considers his own interrogatory reticence: “Was it because I was no longer a child that I dared not ask? Is it only children who, as in fairy tales, ask the right questions?” Grass, Peeling the Onion, 10.
“Those things about” Umberto Eco, “Umberto Eco: The Art of Fiction No. 197,” interview by Lila Azam Zanaganeh, Paris Review, Summer 2008.
Epilogue
“There is no inevitability” Stern, Five Germanys, 10.
It is a very strange Detjen, “Kurt and Helen Wolff,” in Immigrant Entrepreneurship.
Some 54 percent Greenberg Research poll, cited in Stanley B. Greenberg, “Trump Is Beginning to Lose His Grip,” New York Times, November 17, 2018.
under cover of falsehoods One of many examples: A presidential tweet claimed that the German crime rate had shot up because of Merkel’s decision to welcome refugees. Yet we would walk around the city and through deserted pedestrian tunnels in U-Bahn stations late at night feeling perfectly safe—because in fact, crime in Germany was at its lowest level in twenty-five years. Christopher F. Schuetze and Michael Wolgelenter, “Fact Check: Trump’s False and Misleading Claims about Germany’s Crime and Immigration,” New York Times, June 18, 2018.
“Evil,” he wrote Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2004), 24. Max Brod salvaged this quote from one of the notebooks Kafka filled with fragments and aphorisms between 1917 and 1919.
As a product of both Kurt’s use of “the same task before us” in his letter to Maria echoes Abraham Lincoln’s “the great task remaining before us” in the Gettysburg Address—rhetorical rope that lashes together the German and American branches of my family’s story.
Index
Note: Abbreviation KWV stands for Kurt Wolff Verlag.
Adams, Mildred, 103
Albrecht, Elisabeth Merck Wolff, 8, 15, 37, 58–61, 75, 93, 116, 145–47, 151, 163, 170, 216–18, 244–45, 248–51, 354n
Albrecht, Hans, 58, 60–61, 74, 115, 170, 201–02, 204, 250, 252, 278, 345n, 354n, 360n
Almanac of Art and Poetry (KWV), 1, 267
Altah (Yemeni student), 235, 237
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), 30–31, 47, 51–52, 230–31
America (Kafka), 128, 347n
Améry, Jean (aka Hanns Chaim Mayer), 223, 356n
Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl (Johnson), 312–13
antisemitism, 20–21, 24, 27–28, 64, 89, 100, 282, 293, 301. See also neo-Nazi movement
Arbeitskur, 2
Arendt, Hannah, 72, 74, 89, 101, 214, 332n, 355n
Auden, W. H., 133–34, 347n
Auschwitz (concentration camp), 50, 127, 202, 223, 260, 356n, 362n, 363n
Austerlitz, Czech, 38
Autoritätsdusel, 74
Backe, Herbert, 119
Baden, Germany, 19–29, 332n, 333n
Baillet-Latour, Henri de, 238–39
Bank für Handel und Industrie Darmstadt, 333n
Bankier, David, 110
Basic Verities: Poetry and Prose (Péguy), 347n
Battle of Stalingrad, 138
Battle of the Ardennes (1914), 35
Battle of the Bulge (aka Watch on the Rhine), 140
Bauer, Felice, 34
Baumhauer, Hans, 155, 168
Baumhauer, Jon, 152, 161, 244, 251–52, 280, 310, 360n
Baumhauer, Maria Wolff. See Wolff, Maria
A Beautiful Mind (Nasar), 233
Bedford, Sybille, 78
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 329n
Benedict XIV (Pope), 342n
Bernschneider-Reif, Sabine, 283
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (series), 346n
Bildung/Bildungsbürgertum, 13, 19, 62–64, 73, 88, 225, 299–300, 331n
Binder, Harald, 281
Bingham, Hiram, IV (“Harry”), 100, 343n
Birkenau (concentration camp), 127
Bleibtreu (Pfarrer), 10
Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany (Ohler), 146–50, 348n
Bloodlands (Snyder), 120, 124–25
Boateng, Jérôme, 51–52
Bohr, Niels, 187
Bollingen Foundation, 190–91
Bollingen Series (books), 352n, 356n
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 236, 354n, 363n
Book-of-the-Month Club, 190
Bormann, Martin, 143
Böttcher, Wilhelm, 49
Bouty (Madame), 94, 107
Boy Scouts of America, 225
Brahms, Johannes, 10–13
Brandeis, Louis, 333n
Brecht, Bertolt, 71
Breivik, Anders, 51
Brighton, NY, 225
Broch, Hermann, 185–86, 352n
Brod, Max, 16–17, 300, 331n, 364n
Brosse (Herr), 305–06
Brown, Earle, 356n
Brügmann, Walter, 283
Burhop, Carsten, 361n
Burroughs, William S., 148
Cage, John, 356n
Campbell, Joseph, 356n
Camus, Albert, 134
CARE packages, 164, 349n, 350n
Case, Clifford, 223
Casorati, Felice, 56
The Castle (Kafka), 347n
Catholicism/Catholic Church, 22, 87, 182, 242, 351n, 356n, 363n
Cavanaugh (Mr.), 220
Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, 281
Chagall, Marc, 101
Chamberlain, Neville, 342n
Charles X (king of France), 22
Charlottesville, VA, 31, 231
Chekhov, Anton, 46
citizenship, 9, 65, 128, 182, 222–23, 261, 299–300, 303–06, 316, 341n, 357n
civil rights movement, 180, 336n, 351n
Claudel, Paul, 134
Claudius, Matthias, 18
Clay, Lucius, 163–64
Clement XIII (Pope), 342n
Cohen, Hermann, 192
Colloredo-Mansfeld, Bertha, 96–99, 107
Colloredo-Mansfeld, Hieronymus, 98
Colloredo-Mansfeld, Maya, 98
Communist Manifesto (Marx), 90
The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 133–34
concentration camps, 98, 121, 153, 159–60, 175–79, 203, 207, 254, 258, 260, 292–93, 305, 336n, 343n, 362n, 363n. See also internment camps
Country Journal (magazine), 226
Cousins, Norman, 179
Creditanstalt, 333n
Crome, Annemarie, 263–69
Crome, Annemarie von Putttkamer (“Amo”), 59–60, 244, 249, 264, 267–68, 270, 359n
Crome, Enoch Karl Gerd (“Pflaume”), 59, 215, 244, 263–70, 301
Crome, Fritz, 245, 264–65, 267–70
